Ar­me­nian shelling kills 2

Ar­me­nian forces have killed a two-year-old Azer­bai­jani girl and her grand­mother in a fresh bor­der clash near the break­away Nagorny Karabakh re­gion, Baku said yes­ter­day. Ex-Soviet Azer­bai­jan and Ar­me­nia are locked in a decades-long con­flict over the dis­puted re­gion, and fre­quent ex­changes of fire nearly spi­raled back into all-out war a year ago. The tod­dler and her grand­mother were killed Tues­day “as a re­sult of a tar­geted and de­lib­er­ate at­tack on civil­ians” in the vil­lage of Alkhanli “by the armed forces of Ar­me­nia” us­ing mor­tars and heavy grenade launch­ers, Azer­bai­jan’s for­eign min­istry said in a state­ment. Karabakh’s rebel au­thor­i­ties said they opened fire in response to Azer­bai­jan shelling their po­si­tions. “Azer­bai­ja­nis de­ploy their po­si­tions in pop­u­lated ar­eas, us­ing civil­ians as a hu­man shield,” a Karabakh de­fense min­istry state­ment said. Baku and Yere­van have feuded over the Nagorny Karabakh re­gion since Ar­me­nian sep­a­ratists seized the ter­ri­tory in a war that claimed some 30,000 lives in the early 1990s and ended in a frag­ile 1994 truce.